Emmy Noether

(1882 - 1935)

In 1935, the year of Emmy Noether's death,
Albert Einstein wrote in a letter to the New York Times, "In the
judgement of the most competent living mathematicians, Fraulein
Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus
far produced since the higher education of women began." Born in 1882
in Germany, Emmy Noether persisted in the face of tremendous
obstacles to become one of the greatest algebraists of this
century.

Known primarily for her profound and
beautiful theorems in ring theory, Emmy Noether's most significant
achievement runs deeper: she changed the way mathematicians think
about their subject. "She taught us to think in simple, and thus
general, terms... homomorphic image, the group or ring with
operators, the ideal... and not in complicated algebraic
calculations," said her colleague P.S. Alexandroff during a memorial
service after her death. In this way, she cleared a path toward the
discovery of new algebraic pattems that had previously been
obscured.

Despite her intellectual achievements and
the recognition of such mathematicians as David Hilbert and Hermann
Weyl, Emmy Noether endured years of poor treatment by German
universities, where for a time she could not even lecture under her
own name. Weyl later wrote that, even when the Nazis prevented her
from lecturing, "her courage, her frankness, her unconcern about her
own fate, her conciliatory spirit, were, in the midst of all the
hatred and meanness, despair and sorrow...a moral solace." Forced out
of Germany by the Nazis in 1933, Emmy Noether came to Bryn Mawr
College, where she soon collected many students and colleagues around
her. She died there just two years later at the age of
fifty-three.